Red Hot Chili Peppers – Snow
John Anthony Frusciante is an American musician and songwriter, best known as the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has released 11 solo albums and 7 EPs, ranging in style from acoustic guitar music to electronic music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frusciante
We asked ourselves what is the most successful band in the history of alternative rock?!
Well along with so many bands we have listened through all these years, one is the most brightly highlighted in our consciousness. They first started their musical journey in 1983 in Los Angeles and immediately stole the hearts of the melomaniacs. The interweaving of styles like Punk, Funk and Psychedelic rock brought them millions of sold records worldwide, many awards and well deserved love of the countless fans.
The mysterious band we have just told you about is the pioneer of mixing many styles – Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Some history:
This band has a very rich history. From the times that the band was formed by the vocalist Anthony Kiedis till today’s formation , they significantly changed. Kiedis met the other three group members in his student’s years. However after a few albums, devastated from the guitarist Hillel Slovak’s death in 1988, the drummer Jack Irons left the band and they needed to recruit more musicians.
John Frusciante was the next guitarist in the band along with the new drummer Chad Smith. Sadly, shortly after his joining and recording of two albums , Frusciante couldn’t get accustomed to the newfound popularity in this band and he just left it. The following situation of the band was characterized by many temporary guitarists until they came across Dave Navarro.
For the next few years, the band had problems and after a short time Navarro left as well. That caused the returning of their previous guitarist – Frusciante and in these times happened to have Red Hot,s ultimate commercial success. But decided to develop his solo career, John Frusciante has left the band for the second time in a row and was replaced by the new guitarist Josh Klinghoffer until 2019 when he returned once again to record their new album in 2022.
Undoubtedly Frusciante is an absolute talent and the songs which he composed became favorites to fans and guitar players and their sound is distinguishable for every one of us. His Fiesta Red Fender Strat from 1961 and Telecaster Custom 1963 are amongst his favorites along with Marshall Major and Marshall Jubilee and this is how his fat sound was born acoustically and plugged in. Achieving this specific clean sound he is well known for, is a combination between vibrating of the springs of the back of the Fender Strat and playing on the certain frets where you can hear a reverb like sound. When it comes to pedal boards, he uses many- Boss DS-2 Turbo Distortion, Boss SD-1 Overdrive, MXR M133, Big Muff Electro-harmonix, Ibanez Tube Screamer and so on.
“Snow” Guitar Tone Recreation
Tone recreation with Efektor Compressor, Efektor Fuzz. Amplifikation Caliburn, and Efektor Reverb.
In this week’s article we decided to recreate one of our favorite songs by the band Red Hot Chili Peppers- “Snow”. In this specific song and in the whole album Frusciante used Marshall Major Bass 200W Model 1978 for his main recording amp and for the distorted parts, he used Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi and Electro-Harmonix English Muff’n.
For those of you who want to bring that specific sound of John Frusciante’s to their computer, we will build the tone with our Marshall inspired amp simulator Amplifikation Caliburn with the help of our Efektor Compressor and the reverb module all combined in Amplifikation 360 for the clean tone and our Fuzz Efektor, especially the The Big Fuzz Type.
For the clean part we will use the compressor pedal to even out the amazing arpeggiated riff of the song. The whole tone is based on quite clean amp settings and the compressor is first on the chain.
When the last chorus hits the arrangement around the 3:54 minute mark, another guitar track is overdubbed and it clearly sounds like the Fuzz pedal is engaged. So, our Big Fuzz fits the tone quite well.
Here is the amp. We are using the cleanest channel of our Caliburn B model with mild settings and a touch of the sag setting.
For the cab, the 4×12 Reissue with the classic Dynamic 57 microphone works just fine, but a second cabinet for more bottom end was added.
The Plate Reverb mixed quite low in the mix is placed at the end of the chain for ambience.
Here is the full finished preset in Amplifikation 360
Keep in mind the whole guitar part should be played tight and clean. That’s the beauty of the whole riff.
Here you can hear the whole mix
Audio Sample:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B5Y-H0aDUUNGAHIdd-EDxZ-gAG3ap1vz/view?usp=sharing
Here you can download the preset and copy it to your presets folder:
Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zjesIKD418EP89oypCOCy4oaQKKjUi33/view?usp=sharing
The preset file for A360 looks like this:Red Peppers Snow.ka360p copy the file after extracting it from the zip file at:
Presets folder:
Windows:
C:\Users\[User Name]\Documents\Kuassa\Presets\Amplifikation360
Mac:
/Users/[User Name]/Music/Kuassa/Presets/Amplifikation360
John Frusciante could be considered as a riff master and guitar hero with distinctive playing and individuality. We hope you will enjoy this week’s tone recreation and get some inspiration to write and create your next track. Keep Rocking!
Stay tuned for more tones with history, explanation and preset for download!